Did anyone believe that President Barack Obama was passionately committed to the Afghanistan war that he escalated at the same time he announced a withdrawal date?

Is there anyone who thought that Hillary Clinton in 2008 calibrated her position on the Iraq War based on the state of play in Anbar province rather than the Iowa caucuses?

Does anyone consider Vice President Joe Biden a thoughtful policy maven with a long history getting stuff right?

Before going any further, let’s stipulate that there’s something a little unseemly about the Gates book project. Gates has always seemed among the most old-school and stand-up of our political elites, yet even he reverted to the all-too-typical play of keeping notes for his memoir, to be published as soon as possible upon leaving office.

If what Gates tell us isn’t particularly new, it still packs a punch coming from such a highly placed, credible source. For Obama, Afghanistan is the insincere war. More than 1,500 troops have died there during his time in office—almost three times as many as under Bush —yet by early 2011 the president had lost whatever faith he had in the war, according to Gates.

In the telling of his former secretary of defense, Obama violated what should be the psychological Powell Doctrine: If you don’t believe in it, don’t fight it.

John Kerry famously asked during the Vietnam War: How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? Now the secretary of state should pose a version of his long-ago rhetorical question to his boss. Obama evidently has been asking men to die for what he considers a mistake for years now.

As reported in the press, Gates describes a dawning realization at a March 2011 meeting in the situation room. “As I sat there,” he writes, “I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

This is the war that the president and other Democrats had long hailed as “the good war.” He advocated for a surge in Afghanistan all during his first run for president.

Candidate Obama made the first item in his proposed “comprehensive strategy” in the war on terror, “getting out of Iraq and on to the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” He was explicit about sending more troops, saying we needed enough on the ground “so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”

The president may have meant every word he said at the time, but his position also happens to have been politically convenient. It allowed him to promise a quick exit from one (very unpopular) war while still sounding tough on the other. He wasn’t a stereotypical dove, but a nuanced, clear-eyed hawk, ready to take the fight to Al Qaeda, where it really counted.

Once in office, the rhetoric came due. By all accounts, the president felt trapped by his own advocacy. He and his team resented the military for asking for more troops than he really wanted to send. He escalated by about 50,000 all told, anyway, although with an uncertain trumpet and a highly ambivalent spirit.

Gates writes of how Obama’s political advisers steadily worked on him, driving distrust of the military and skepticism of the war. They were pushing on an open door. According to Gates the president was “deeply suspicious” of senior military officers and “considered time spent with generals and admirals an obligation.”

Gates still says the president got the big decisions right, so what difference does his sincerity or lack of it make? There are costs to half-heartedness. After announcing the surge, Obama began to effectively vote present on his own war. He has refused to make a concerted case for it in the face of a skeptical public.

And if a president doesn’t believe in a war, he is obviously less likely to see it through, despite hard-won gains. The cost of liquidating our position in Iraq—after failed, half-hearted negotiations for a new status of forces agreement—has been a resurgence of Al Qaeda in Iraq. If we pull out from Afghanistan right away, the Taliban will surely enjoy a similar windfall.

The White House damage-control strategy is pretending that the Gates book is most damning about Biden, whom Gates says has gotten everything wrong for decades. So it is manfully defending the Metternich of the Naval Observatory. Biden is “one of the leading statesmen of his time,” according to the White House. The president went so far as to allow photographers to take pictures of him having lunch with the vice president.

But the true scandal is Obama’s distance from his own war. Here is a conflict that began with an invasion that he supported, that he consistently called for escalating and that he ordered tens of thousands of additional troops to go fight, yet he resisted taking ownership of it, even though he’s the commander in chief with ultimate responsibility.

“I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops,” Gates writes, “only his support for their mission.” Stranger words may never have been written about an American president.